The BookSmarts Podcast, with Joshua Tallent

The month of October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and this week's podcast features Nick Espinosa, an expert in cybersecurity and network infrastructure. Nick has consulted with clients ranging from small businesses up to the fortune 500 level for decades, and he's the Chief Security Fanatic at Security Fanatics, a cybersecurity and cyber warfare firm that's dedicated to designing custom cyber...

There are some changes happening around keywords and reviews at Amazon, so we take a few minutes this week to talk about them. Amazon recently changed their keyword requirements again. It is unclear how broad this change is, and whether it will even stay in place, but Amazon started restricting the Keywords field to 350 characters a few weeks ago for some titles at some publishers. Because this is...

Mary McAveney, Chief Marketing Officer at Open Road Integrated Media joins us this week on the BookSmarts Podcast. Mary has extensive expertise in marketing, strategy, and branding in the publishing industry, and now helps the Open Road team tackle marketing and discovery with data-driven tactics and a comprehensive understanding of direct-to-consumer marketing. In this episode, Mary and Josh...

Alessandra Torre, CEO of Authors A.I. and BingeBooks and a NY Times bestselling Psychological Thriller and Romance author, joins Joshua to talk about various strategies independent authors utilize when marketing and selling their books, and how publishers can take advantage of these strategies. Alessandra's suggestions cover a wide range of topics. Being flexible in pricing, testing new prices per...

In this episode, Michael Cader, Founder of Publisher's Lunch and  PublishersMarketplace.com , joins me to talk about some of the challenges and opportunities publishers are encountering. Publishers are doing great right now, with record sales and profit margins, and larger year-over-year growth than anyone could have expected. Meanwhile, the people who work in publishing, including books...

Amazon has recently made two big changes to their publishing systems, and both of these changes will have an impact on publishers of all sizes. The first change is that Amazon now allows publishers using the Kindle Digital Publishing (KDP) platform to set up A+ Content for their book product pages. The A+ program has historically only been available to companies who are signed up for the Brand Reg...

Standards are an important driving force in every civilization. Standards help us all agree on how we define things, and provide opportunities for us to more effectively engage with each other in trade and in other ways. There is an interesting article in Science Magazine about how traders in the ancient Near East and Europe, during the Bronze Age, developed standardized weights and measures over...

In this episode, Joshua talks with Erik Nelson, a friend and marketing consultant, about how publishers can approach rethinking their own branding, and develop a more powerful approach to marketing based on their passion and mission. Publishers, like other businesses, will fit broadly into three categories: 1) Those who are starting from scratch, have no major direct-to-consumer approach or market...

Keywords are a popular topic among book metadata experts and book marketers, and publishers reach out to me all the time to ask for clarification and advice on how to effectively deal with them. So, in this episode of the podcast, we are going to break down the topic of keywords for you in depth. Why do keywords matter? What are the best sources of keywords? How does Amazon's search engine use the...

In this episode, Joshua talks with Andy Hunter, Founder & CEO of BookShop.org . Andy started BookShop out of a concern for the future of independent bookstores. As Amazon has grown and taken a larger share of the online book selling market, publishers have become more dependent on that one store. BookShop aims to give more power back to indie booksellers and to publishers, by providing a...

This episode starts with a story about clay tablets and builds a connection all the way up to a modern metadata issue. The story is about how a team of researchers utilized cutting edge mathematics to trace the trade itineraries and sales transactions left behind by Assyrian merchants 4,000 years ago. Using this information, the team was able to determine the location of cities that were hidden to...

In this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast, Joshua talks with Ian Lamont, founder of i30 Media Corporation , about advertising on Amazon and Facebook, utilizing his website to build community, and building direct to consumer sales. Amazon advertising offers some excellent opportunities to advertise your products and your brands, and has put a lot of thought into how products are discovered and...

In this episode Joshua speaks with Dr. Rachel Noorda ( @rachellynchase ), Director of Book Publishing and Assistant Professor in English, and Dr. Kathi Inman Berens ( @kathiiberens ), Associate Professor of Book Publishing and Digital Humanities, at Portland State University. Rachel and Kathi are the lead researchers on Panorama Project's Immersive Media & Reading Consumer Survey , a surv...

This week, Joshua talks with Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Chief Content Officer at LibraryPass, about how publishers can become more data-informed and avoid the pitfalls of being too data-driven. The data-driven approach to publishing can lead to myopic thinking and decision-making. When a publisher only makes decisions based on Amazon sales numbers, they are likely to miss some important data about wh...

In this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast, Joshua interviews Brian O'Leary, Executive Director of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) , the US book industry's trade organization. Brian and Joshua talk about three areas where Brian sees the industry struggling now and with space for continued growth in the future. First, Book Publishing is a small industry, so it is important that we leverage our...

In this episode, Joshua discusses how he sees some similarities between the state of the publishing industry and the story of the Oakland A's baseball team as told in the movie Moneyball. Competition is fierce, and solid data practices can be the key factor between success and failure. Music by Timmoor from Pixabay

This short episode will give you some information on my background, why I started the BookSmarts Podcast, and what you can expect from future episodes.  Music by Timmoor from Pixabay